Top Google executive’s daughter, Sophie Schmidt, recounts secretive trip to North Korea with dad and freelance diplomats: ‘A mix of highly-staged encounters … and what seemed like genuine human moments’

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, third from left, and former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, second from right, watch as a North Korean student surfs the Internet at a computer lab during a tour of Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang, North Korea on Jan. 8. (David Guttenfelder/AP)

"It might not get weirder than this."

Those were the prescient words of 19-year-old Sophie Schmidt, the daughter of Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, who accompanied her father on his secretive trip to North Korea earlier this month.

The articulate teen relayed her experiences from the controversial journey on her blog, “Sophie in North Korea.”

The private delegation, which included the Schmidts, former New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and a handful of other freelance diplomats, urged the shut-away nation’s leadership, which tightly controls information, to allow cellphones and more open Internet access.

Calling North Korea a “very, very strange country,” the younger Schmidt recounted that the trip was “a mixture of highly-staged encounters, tightly-orchestrated viewings and what seemed like genuine human moments.”

“We had zero interactions with non-state-approved North Koreans and were never far from our two minders," she added.

Sophie Schmidt, the teenage daughter of Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, accompanied her father on his trip to North Korea earlier this month. She wrote about the trip on her blog, called “Sophie in North Korea.” (https://sites.google.com/site/sophieinnorthkorea/home)

During the highly orchestrated trip, the group visited computer and software manufacturing sites, libraries and universities.

Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, is the highest-profile American business executive to visit North Korea since Kim Jong Un took power a year ago. His daughter Sophie was allowed to tag along and made some fascinating observations along the way.

The younger Schmidt wrote that the customs form she was asked to fill out upon landing in North Korea asked her to declare if she possessed a “killing device” or “publishings of all kinds.”

The insightful teen had a few things to say about the capital as well.

“Pyongyang itself is oddly charming. Broad boulevards, taller buildings than you'd expect, and a fair number of pedestrians. Very clean,” she wrote. “Stylish women in heeled boots and makeup. Given the season, it was all tundra but I can imagine it would be quite pretty in bloom."

On her blog, the younger Schmidt mused about cities, people and even power shortages. (sites.google.com/site/sophieinnorthkorea/home)

Despite the odd reputation of the country’s leaders, Schmidt said the people were actually quite lovely.

“North Koreans we met were unfailingly polite and engaging, even excited to meet with us,” she wrote.

But the staged nature of parts of the visit was evident for most of the group’s tour, Schmidt said. During a tour of Pyongyang's elite Kim Il Sung University, where students have permission to access the Internet for research purposes, Schmidt said it was clear that much of what the envoy was seeing was probably not in line with reality.

“No one was actually doing anything. A few scrolled or clicked (on their computers) but the rest just stared,” she wrote. “More disturbing: when our group walked in, not one of them looked up from their desks. Not a head turn, no eye contact, no reaction to stimuli. They might as well have been figurines.”

Schmidt called that particular incident “unsettling.”

“We knew nothing about what we were seeing, even as it was in front of us,” she explained. “Were they really students? Did our handlers honestly think we bought it? Did they even care?”

Sophie Schmidt, 19, summed up the trip in the title of the blog post: "It might not get weirder than this." (sites.google.com/site/sophieinnorthkorea/home)

For his part, Richardson, a former ambassador to the United Nations, said his motives for going were to call on the country’s leadership to put a moratorium on missile launches and nuclear tests that have prompted U.N. sanctions and to ask for fair and humane treatment for a detained American citizen.

The four-day trip, which was roundly criticized by the State Department as “unhelpful,” took place at a delicate time in U.S.-North Korean relations. Less than a month ago, North Korea shot a satellite into space, a launch widely celebrated in Pyongyang but condemned by Washington and others as a banned test of missile technology.

Not everything on the trip was quite that serious, however.

Schmidt recalled an afternoon when, immediately after exiting a subway car in Pyongyang, she witnessed the power at the train station go out.

“The commuters around us immediately pulled out flashlights, which they presumably carry all the time,” Schmidt wrote, adding that when it was all said and done, her top takeaways were:

“1. Go to North Korea if you can. It is very, very strange; 2. If it is January, disregard the above. It is very, very cold; and 3. Nothing I'd read or heard beforehand really prepared me for what we saw.”